'Pain make man think. Thought make man wise. Wisdom make life endurable' : Sakini, in "The Tea House of the August Moon" by John Patrick, (1953)

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

The Caliphate of Trump And a Planet in Ruins. By Tom Engelhardt

The United States… has
at least 800 global garrisons.. a number
that puts in the shade the global garrisons of any other great power in
history, and to go with them, more than 450,000 military personnel stationed outside
its borders…. like no other power in history, it has divided the world - every
bit of it - as if slicing a pie, into six military commands; that’s six commands for every inch of the globe (and another
two for space and cyberspace)… The
U.S. puts approximately a trillion dollars annually in taxpayer funds into its
military, its 17 intelligence agencies, and what’s now called “homeland
security.” Its national security budget is larger than those of the next eight countries combined
and still rising yearly..

They are the extremists. If you need proof,
look no further than the Afghan capital, Kabul, where the latest wave of suicide bombings has proven
devastating. Recently, for instance, a fanatic set off his explosives among a group of citizens
lining up outside a government office to register to vote in upcoming
elections. At least 57 people died, including 22 women and eight children.
ISIS’s branch in Afghanistan proudly took responsibility for that callous act
-- but one not perhaps quite as callous as the ISIS suicide bomber who, in
August 2016, took out a Kurdish wedding in Turkey, missing the
bride and groom but killing at least 54 people and wounding another 66.
Twenty-two of the dead or injured were children and the bomber may even have been a child himself.

Such acts are extreme,
which by definition makes the people who commit them extremists. The same
is true of those like the “caliph” of the now-decimated Islamic State, Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi, who order, encourage, or provide the ideological framework for
such acts -- a judgment few in this country (or most other places on the
planet) would be likely to dispute. In this century, from Kabul to Baghdad, Paris to San Bernardino, such extreme acts of indiscriminate
civilian slaughter have only multiplied. Though relatively commonplace, each
time such a slaughter occurs, it remains an event of horror and is treated as
such in the media. If committed by Islamists against Americans or Europeans,
suicide attacks of this sort are given 24/7 coverage here, often for days at a
time.

And keep in mind that
such extreme acts aren’t just restricted to terror groups, their lone wolf
followers, or even white nationalists and other crazed men in
this country, armed to the teeth, who, in schools,workplaces, restaurants, and elsewhere, regularly wipe out groups of innocents. Take the recent charges that the Syrian government of Bashar
al-Assad used outlawed chemical weapons in a rebel-held suburb of Damascus,
that country’s capital, killing families and causing havoc. Whether that
specific act proves to have been as advertised or not, there can be
no question that the Assad regime has regularly slaughtered its own citizens
with chemical weapons, barrel bombs, artillery barrages, and (sometimes
Russian) air strikes, destroying neighborhoods, hospitals, schools,
markets, you name it. All of this adds up to a set of extreme acts of the
grimmest kind. And such acts could be multiplied across significant parts of
the planet, ranging from the Myanmar military’s brutal ethnic-cleansing
campaign against that country’s Rohingya minority to acts of state
horror in places like South Sudan and the Congo. In this sense, our world
certainly doesn’t lack either extreme thinking or the acts that go with it.

We here in the United
States are, of course, eternally shocked by their extremism, theirwillingness
to kill the innocent without compunction, particularly in the case of Islamist
groups, from the 9/11 attacks to ISIS’s more recent slaughters… read more: